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Keyboard Technique As Contrapuntal Structure in J. S. Bach's Clavier Works

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Keyboard Technique As Contrapuntal Structure in J. S. Bach's Clavier Works Understanding Bach, 10, 85–107 © Bach Network UK 2015 Keyboard Technique as Contrapuntal Structure in J. S. Bach’s Clavier Works* MATTHEW J. HALL The concept of inventio has received much attention in the theory and analysis of eighteenth-century composition, particularly in Bach studies. Since Laurence Dreyfus’ seminal contributions, and at variance with his own nuanced approach to the topic, inventio is often seen as the essential category of musical thought and creation, and is set in opposition to dispositio.1 The procedures which generate sections of music from an initial idea (inventio) are viewed as more important for understanding the musical structure of the music than the order (dispositio) in * An early version of this research was presented at the 16th Biennial International Baroque Conference at Universität Mozarteum Salzburg on 12 July 2014. I wish to acknowledge Annette Richards, David Yearsley, Neal Zaslaw, Elizabeth Lyon, David H. Miller, and my anonymous reader for their helpful comments on drafts of this article. 1 The locus classicus is Laurence Dreyfus, Bach and the Patterns of Invention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); other important expositions are Dreyfus, ‘Bachian Invention and its Mechanisms’, in John Butt (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bach (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 171–92 and ‘J. S. Bach’s Concerto Ritornellos and the Question of Invention’, Musical Quarterly, 71/3 (1985), 327–58. For analytic approaches to inventio in the Inventions, BWV 772–786, see Ellwood Derr, ‘The two part inventions: Bach’s composers’ vademecum’, Music Theory Spectrum, 3 (1981), 26–48; Michaela Corduban, ‘La rhétorique des idées musicales dans les Inventions à deux voix de Jean-Sébastien Bach: Proposition d’un modèle analytique’, Musurgia, 12/1 (2005), 9–34; and Olli Väisälä, ‘Bach’s Inventions: Figuration, Register, Structure, and the “Clear Way to Develop Inventions Properly”’, Music Theory Spectrum, 31/1 (2009), 101–52. For the concept of inventio in keyboard music generally, see Darrell Berg, ‘“Das Verändern … ist … unentbehrlich”: variation as invention in C. P. E. Bach’s keyboard music’, in Paul Corneilson and Peter Wollny (eds.), Er ist der Vater, wir sind die Bub’n: Essays in Honor of Christoph Wolff (Ann Arbor: Steglein Publishing, 2010), 20–42; Laurenz Lütteken, ‘Inventio und Varietas: Anmerkungen zur Intention des Wohltemperierten Claviers’, in Volker Kalisch (ed.), Bachs Wohltemperiertes Klavier in Perspektiven (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 2002), 11–28; and Christoph Wolff, ‘Invention, Composition and the Improvement of Nature: Apropos Bach the Teacher and Practical Philsopher’, in Christopher Hogwood (ed.), The Keyboard in Baroque Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 133–9. Two important studies of inventio in vocal music are Don Franklin, ‘Konvention und Invention in Kantate 46: Johann Sebastian Bachs Kantate für den 10. Sonntag nach Trinitatis’, Arolser Beiträge zur Musikforschung, 7 (1999), 181–206 and László Somfai, ‘Inventio és elaboratio J. S. Bach zenéjében: Széljegyzetek vokális töredékekhez [Inventio and elaboratio in the music of J. S. Bach: Remarks on vocal fragments]’, Zenetudományi dolgozatok (1999), 257–73. Karol Berger addresses inventio in Bach’s vocal music in Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Berger’s book is also important for its treatment of inventio from philosophical and cultural perspectives. 86 Matthew J. Hall which those sections ultimately appear in the finished composition.2 This perspective can account in an appealing way for how large-scale musical form arises given a strict economy of material, as in Bach’s musical language: strict derivation (e.g. of counterpoint) generates, parses, and relates formal constituents, while the economy of the material integrates and unifies these constituents.3 Likewise the large-scale tonal plan of a composition may result from polyphonic procedures with respect to the basic inventio, not the succession of harmonies in their own right.4 In short, the form of a work by Bach is understood to be independent of the temporal sequence of events. Instead, the form inheres in the ‘logical’ (that is, derivational) relationships among the formal constituents; the position of these constituents—temporally or tonally, relative to each other or with respect to the whole—is secondary.5 Notwithstanding the importance of these perspectives for analysis of Bach’s musical forms, the relationship between inventio and dispositio remains problematic.6 Although he did not use these terms, Donald Francis Tovey suggested a rapprochement between inventio and dispositio—albeit in characteristically allusive and elliptical tones: Are there any pieces of music so constructed that a complete definition of their form will account for every note? Would not such pieces achieve the theoretical ultimate possibility in the way of strictness? Strange to say, this is no mere theoretical possibility. When Bach writes a piece in which a known chorale-tune is treated by several parts in close fugue, phrase by phrase, while another part gives out the phrases in their order, in long notes at regular intervals, this form actually does prescribe for most of the notes in the whole piece, and the exigencies of counterpoint seem to determine the remaining notes. Such a form is a not unreasonable exercise for students; and a student’s exercise appears to differ from Bach’s in no discoverable matter of form. But whereas the student is proud to achieve grammatical correctness, Bach’s chorale-fugue [i.e. cantus-firmus chorale prelude with Vorimitation] is a masterpiece of rhetoric. Now if we are correct in our view that an art form grows from within instead of being moulded from without, then it ought to 2 See Dreyfus, Bach and the Patterns of Invention, 27–9 and Berger, Bach’s Cycle, 95–6. 3 Dreyfus, Bach and the Patterns of Invention, 14–22. 4 Berger, Bach’s Cycle, 95–6. For a discussion of the intellectual antecedents of Berger’s view, see Gergely Fazekas, ‘J. S. Bach and the Two Cultures of Musical Form’, Understanding Bach, 10 (2015), 109–12. 5 Some recent writings that take up the issue of dispositio, either tacitly or explicitly, include: Stefan Orgass, ‘Disposition und Ausarbeitung in Bachs späten Clavier-Werken (1739–1749)’, PhD diss., Folkwang Hochschule Essen, 1995; Gergely Fazekas, ‘Inventio vs. dispositio: A bachi fúga às a zenei forma [Inventio vs. dispositio: Bach’s fugues and musical form]’, Magyar zene: Zenetudományi folyóirat, 47/2 (2009), 147–61; Joseph Kerman, The Art of Fugue: Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and Mark Anson- Cartwright, ‘Subdominant Returns in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach’, Eighteenth-century Music, 10/2 (2013), 253–76. 6 This concern has been raised by Stephen A. Crist, ‘Review of Bach and the Patterns of Invention by Laurence Dreyfus’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 52/3 (1999), 631 and Karl Braunschweig, ‘Review of Bach’s Works for Solo Violin: Style, Structure, Performance by Joel Lester; Bach and the Patterns of Invention by Laurence Dreyfus’, Theory and Practice, 26 (2001), 126. Keyboard Technique as Contrapuntal Structure in J. S. Bach’s Clavier Works 87 be possible to regard Bach’s choral fugue [sic] as having reached its strict form by inner rhetorical necessity. And again this is no abstract absurdity. Bach wrote two entirely different strict chorale-fugues on Aus tiefer Not [i.e. BWV 686 and 687 from Clavier-Übung III] ... The practical fact that Bach must have known beforehand that his art form was going to be so strict has nothing to do with the principles that guided him to prefer the better rhetoric of two equally strict and correct turns of harmony.7 Inventio ‘account[s] for every note’ since strict derivation ‘prescribes for most of the notes’ on the basis of the given idea and ‘the exigencies of counterpoint determine’ the rest. But as Tovey points out, inventio cannot account for the difference between a student exercise and the work of a master composer, nor between two different works by the same composer based on the same basic inventiones. In the former case, the master composer’s inventions surpass the student’s in the rhetoric of their arrangement ‘phrase by phrase … in order.’ In the latter case, not only is the rhetoric of the disposition what distinguishes two works on the same basic material, but moreover this different rhetoric actually guides the composer in discriminating between ‘two equally strict and correct turns of harmony’—that is, a local compositional choice can be made on the basis of larger formal considerations. Thus the stark and ostensibly simple distinction between inventio and dispositio is blurred: the overall disposition can be a result of the basic inventions on the subject, but equally the disposition as a compositional idea in itself can constrain or motivate the inventions which give rise to a subject in both its basic and manipulated forms.8 Perhaps the focus on inventio stems in part from the appealing way in which it can systematise derivational operations as a set of basic, abstract, and iteratively applied operations.9 In particular, contrapuntal manipulations—both on account of their strictness and pervasiveness in Bach’s language—are those that have been seized upon and valorised. In this view, musical material serves to instantiate some abstract contrapuntal property.10 But as Stephen Crist has pointed out: [abstract operations] should be taken cum grano salis. [E]ven for such a highly rational composer as Bach, the creative process was not nearly so tidy ... One of the great paradoxes of human creativity is that such orderly works of art can issue from the chaotic, overlapping, and sometimes contradictory thought processes each one of us experiences every day.11 7 Donald Francis Tovey, ‘Some Aspects of Beethoven’s Art Forms’, in Essays and Lectures on Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), 296–7.
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